Liberals think there are lots of ideas that intelligent Americans just aren’t supposed to challenge. If they do, they’ll be labeled “deniers,” intentionally raising a nasty comparison to Holocaust rejectionists. It’s politics at its absolute lowest.
Among the unchallengeable dogmata: the Obama stimulus created millions of jobs, Obamacare will save trillions of dollars, Dodd-Frank prevents future bank bailouts, and policy uncertainty isn’t an issue hampering the recovery. And, of course, global warming poses an existential threat to civilization and humanity. Make that an “undeniable” threat.
You can now add “income inequality” to the list, thanks to New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait. In a column headlined “The Ideological Fantasies of Inequality Deniers,” Chait writes: “Rising income inequality, like climate change, is an ideologically inconvenient issue for conservatives. … The underlying facts, like the facts of climate change, are stark. Over the last few decades, income growth for most Americans has slowed to a crawl, while income for the very rich has exploded.”
In a way, Chait is correct that income inequality really resembled global warming. Both are issues that, to the extent they are even problems, could be be fixed though faster economic growth. And both serve as handy excuses for the Left to raise taxes and expand government.
The reality about “exploding income inequality” and wage stagnation is far different than what Chait, the Obama White House, and Elizabeth Warren (D-Occupy Wall Street) contend. One example: Brand new research from the University of Chicago’s Bruce Meyer and Notre Dame’s James Sullivan finds “median income and consumption both rose by more than 50 percent in real terms between 1980 and 2009. … Our results provide strong evidence that the well-being of the middle class and the poor has improved considerably over the past thirty years.”
Those results aren’t above challenge. But there certainly seems to be legitimate counter-arguments and evidence to the “exploding income inequality” meme. Indeed, differing household demographics and differing inflation measures between incomes levels means the “rise in American inequality has been exaggerated both in magnitude and timing,” according to Northwestern University’s Robert Gordon. That and other studies undercut a new CBO analysis showing massive income gains for the “1 percent” at the expense of everyone else. But maybe Gordon is a denier, too; another guy on the Koch-RNC payroll. Except Gordon is an Obama supporter.
America needs an informed debate on how the American middle class can prosper in the future the way it has in the past—even if it is ideologically inconvenient for Chait and other liberals.
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I’m so sick of hearing people whine about income inequality. Everyone in America can attend public school for free. If you do well, you can go to a good college. Most of the time if you do well enough you can get a scholarship. If not, you can get student loans. Going to an in state public university is not THAT expensive. If you choose to waste money on an overpriced liberal arts education, that is your problem, not mine. Everyone has these opportunities in America. Most are not willing to do what it takes to succeed. And by the way, if Obama forgives student loan debt who do you think is paying for it? Me, and the rest of the taxpayers. I already paid for my own college education and I don’t want to pay for college for other people because they made poor choices of majors and colleges. These occupy wall street children need to get a clue. Majoring in philosophy, sociology, or women’s studies will not pay the bills and it certainly won’t repay $200k in student loan debt.
It IS that expensive-for anyone who isn’t willing to get a loan he might not be able to pay. Student loans have boosted tuitions for honest people and made a ruling class of oathbreakers.
Read the 10th Commandment
It WOULD be interesting to get a comprehensive chronological listing of liberal causes over the past 50 years. I remember how GlobalCooling was really scaring people circa 1970. We were all doomed by it and a plethora of other ills wrought upon an innocent global society by capitalist pigs who were determined to convert Earth into a blazing ErieCanal. The capitalists eventually cleaned up their collective act, but the anti-capitalists were not so concerned with anything but defeating capitalism – a socialist/marxist preoccupation, no, a psychotic obsession. Anyway, now we’re wrestling with global warming, oh, climate change. Wait a minute… It’s the 99%. Hold on a minute… income inequality?
I suggest that those who refuse to really work 40 hours a week be FORCED to work. That sounds a lot better than forcing people who work to give their money to the government so it can give it to people who won’t work.
Income inequality: Everybody has gotten better off, but some have done better than others.
If my neighbor and I both make $50,000 this year, we have income equality. If next year his salary goes to $200,000 and mine goes to $100,000, we now have an inequality of $100,000. I now have two choices. I can be happy that my income doubled, or I can be upset and go occupy Wall Street because we now have an inequality of $100,000.
Far better to judge how you are doing based on comparing it to how you were doing last year, than to base it on how you are doing compared to others.
I have always found it interesting that when God decided to spell out his ten rules of a prosperous and free society, he didn’t say “Thou shalt not be greedy”, but he did say “Thou shalt not covet.”.
It would appear God realized that being envious of what others have leads to far more strife than desiring to go out and get more stuff for yourself.
You are so right. The worst of the ills to infect our culture over the last 50 years, since Government radically changed the rules to force fairness on our society, is GREED in the form of ENVY, essentially covetousness. Some are so focused on the apparent good fortune of others that they are rendered entirely impotent to produce anything of value in favor of complaining that they don’t have what someone else does. And the Government is always standing there ready to enforce the faux-unfairness remedy.
Since all the figures being bandied about are based on household income here is another scenario:
You and your neighbor are both single and making $50,000 per year. He gets married and his wife makes $50,000. His household income is now $100,000 an increase of 100%. You get a promotion and /or raise of 10%. Your household income is now $55,000. According to the OWS protestors, your neighbor owes you about $20,000 or so to lessen the growth in inequality.
Of course, there is income inequality – just as there is work-effort inequality.
Well, I guess when we all die of skin cancer or choke to death on the air, the liberals will have had the last laugh, right?
Koch-Funded Berkeley Temperature Study Does “Confirm the Reality of Global Warming”
Climate Progress actually broke this story back in March — see Exclusive: Berkeley temperature study results “confirm the reality of global warming and support in all essential respects the historical temperature analyses of the NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU.” That was based on an email Climatologist Ken Caldeira sent me after seeing their preliminary results and a public talk by Muller confirming:
“We are seeing substantial global warming”
“None of the effects raised by the [skeptics] is going to have anything more than a marginal effect on the amount of global warming.”
But now the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study have completed their “independent” analysis of all of the temperature stations and found a rate of warming since the 1950s as high NOAA and NASA and faster than the (much maligned) UK Hadley/CRU data:
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/10/20/349544/berkeley-temperature-study-results-confirm-global-warming/
Well, since no one has mentioned it yet I’ll throw it in. Countries that eliminate income inequality the best tend to make everyone poor… Out and out socialist countries (the ones with walls to keep people in) being one example. Another; the Scandinavian countries… which while they are not hell holes or slums; average people have much less purchasing power / disposable income than in the US.
I was feeling a little masochistic and took a sociology class about 5 years ago and the textbook, written by a socialist imo, had government stats claiming no change in income rates by slices of the population since the stats started being collected in the 30s.
To the textbook author it was evidence of government being captured by the top earners… but none the less, all the stats still said no change in income ‘equality’.
There has been a change in asset ownership. Fewer people own more today… but this can just as easily be blamed on government / progressive policies. Inheritance tax and business regulation hit the little guys / middle class and favor the wealthy (who can afford to pay compliance costs that others can not)…
So, anyway, the left is as full of it here as they are on most issues…
America needs an informed debate on how the American middle class can prosper in the future the way it has in the past—even if it is ideologically inconvenient for Chait and other liberals.
Go isolationist, and then wait for our economic rivals to go to war and devastate each other, making the factories in the USA the primary source of manufactured goods?
A surprising number of economists and politicians don’t want to admit just how much of the prosperity of the 50s and 60s was due to pure luck, not brilliant management or policy decisions.
Remember when the societal ill that commanded the attention of all decent people throughout Christendom was something called “poverty?”
Whatever happened to fighting “poverty,” anyway? Why is the new self-evident evil now called “inequality?” Why, when I walked into the wrong classroom on the first day of classes a few years ago, did the earnest humanities professor inform me that the class was for something called “Social Justice?”
The questions answer themselves.
I think Joe nails it. The problem with people like Jonathan Chait is they see the currency as the wealth when in fact currency is just a tool used to exchange wealth. The wealth is the goods and services that people produce. The currency is worthless without the real wealth to back it up. Unfortunately it appears most people view wealth this way. They see wealth relative to what other people have rather than in absolute historical terms. In 1930 about 24% of income went to food, now it is less than 10%. That is a real increase in wealth. How much would a computer have cost you 20 years ago that was comparable in power to the one you are sitting in front right now? Tens of thousands? Much of what we own now would have been affordable by only the very wealthy just 20 years ago if it even existed at all. That is a real increase in wealth. The fact that such a large number of people have benefitted from this tremendous increase in wealth does not seem to have any effect on those blinded by envy of people who have more than they do.
The really hilarious thing about ‘income inequality’ is that many studies have shown that the only people who care about it are academics and rabble-rousers. Income equality doesn’t breed happiness; the sense of earning one’s income, whatever it might be, does.
If income inequality bred happiness, wouldn’t everyone be happy if we were all poor?
In any case, the growth of income inequality is largely due to a few innocuous things:
- The rise in illegal immigration (their income pads out the bottom)
- The greater entry of women into the workforce (meaning income-equals now marry, creating ‘super-incomes’, whereas previously rich men tended to marry lower-income women)
- The automation of most of our middle-management work, which was the backbone of the middle class
- Over-education of the American worker, meaning people who graduate with a degree tend to go into high-income jobs, and those who don’t go into very low-income
None of this is because of ‘greed’ or ‘corporate CEOs’ or any of that nonsense.
I didn’t think any others existed. It’s good to see I’m not alone.
There are more than just us.
People who complain about income “disparity” exclude an amazingly wide swath of people who contribute to that disparity. I haven’t heard any rag on Mick Jagger for the tens of millions he personally made when his band last toured. Neither does anyone get upset when either a sports figure or a popular actress signs a contract that is worth millions. No, it is really only a very small group of people that are the target of the OWS crowd: business executives.
Before anyone complains about bank execs getting a bonus funded by a bailout, that is just as outrageous as the participants in the Pigford litigation settlement who claimed that they might have gone into farming but for the pervasive discrimination practiced by the Department of Agriculture. The one point in common that these two share is that of government collusion and funding.
Coveting is coveting and theft is theft. Happily, the more that gets stolen from the tents of the OWS participants, the more they are getting a taste of their own redistributionist schemes.
Could somebody please tell me just how much income inequality is OK in a society? Or is everybody supposed to make exactly the same?
And if some inequality is permissible, how you calculate at that figure? And does it apply to movie stars? Sports figures? Celebrities?
And most important, just how does anyone propose enforcing this outcome?
The left is ready with an answer — indeed, the answer begs the question. Raise taxes on the rich!(P.S. we define “rich” to mean anybody with a decent income). Then we’ll have lots of money for the next Solyndra.
Incomes are not equal because people are not all the same. Steve Jobs created products which changed the world. The guy pouring coffee at 7-11 does not. That doesn’t mean the labor of the latter fellow is worthless or that he is a miserable human being, it just means that Steve Jobs provided a lot more value added to the economy than did the guy at 7-11.
Every little league pitcher does not grow up to win the Cy Young award or even make it to the Major Leagues, for that matter. People are not all the same. Learn to live with it; it’s called “being an adult.”
When I was little, we were very poor and, consequently, eligible for welfare. However, my grandmother was too proud to accept it. She was a country school teacher who believed education was the only way out of poverty. She opposed most of Roosevelt’s programs because she believed people had to be responsible for themselves…that government aid developed dependency. When you can see generations of families that have been on welfare, it’s obvious she was right. I pray our country is able to turn around the Progressives’ march toward socialism . By punishing people who are successful enough to become wealthy by penalizing them with higher taxes, we will be destroying the dream of every American that he can rise to the very top if he is willing to work hard and take risks. Socialism will only ensure Americans are equally poor! The 2012 election will be the most important election ever held in our country.
“The lessons of history … show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, State of the Union address, 1935
Socio-economic desegregation. “Greedy” is the new “Racist”
Obviously the blueprint was written by Al Gore.
Please explain how faster economic growth is in any way a solution to global warming.
Third-world countries can’t afford to clean up their rivers and their air, yet they still pollute like crazy. China’s cities have unbreathable air. The rivers in poor countries contain untreated sewage and industrial offal. Poor countries also don’t have the resources to clean up polluted soil or to set aside wildlife refuges.
Wealthy countries are clean countries.
“Green” (environmentalism) is a luxury. Developing nations are too busy growing their economies and achieving higher living standards to pay heed to environmental concerns. But once a higher median income and lifestyle are achieved, environmental issues are often addressed. I’ve seen it first-hand in many places. That’s why economic growth could allow progress in addressing anthropogenic global warming. Whether AGW actually exists or not is another topic, since the “science” was rigged in most of the research.
China… a third world country? Who owns the majority of US debt?
You forgot to mention that the government of many third world countries are also notoriously corrupt, mismanaging what little money they have, and foreign aid as well.
Yes, China is a third world country. First world is europe, new world is america, third world is everyone else – including japan.
The entire output of China’s two billion people is equal to that of California and Texas combined. China is still a third world country.
The Gross Domestic Product of China is listed as 11.2 trillion estimated for 2012, ranking China as #2 in the world. They were #2 in 2010.
You’re pointing out a phenomenon which caused the social complex to attempt to redefine poverty not in real terms, but in relative terms to ensure that they always have a constituency.
The idea was that anyone earning half of the mean income should be defined as poor.
In other words, while the poor could become more poor, so long as the rich became poorer at a greater rate, poverty was “falling”. The purpose of that redefinition is to produce the outcome desired under Marxist-Leninism which theorized that every person, no matter what they do, should receive the same pay.
Having lived in the DDR, I can tell you that this was only true of the caste of common people, and not the elite in that “workers’ paradise”.
In short, income disparity is meaningless. Dwelling on it as they do, they have no concern whatsoever for the real state of being of the poor, merely that they are used as a wedge against the middle income and the rich, whom they perceive as a barrier to THEIR power over the population. Hitler had his Jewish obsession as a tool to acquire control. Leftist have their emnity for 75% of the population as a tool to acquire control over society.
Please explain how faster economic growth is in any way a solution to global warming.
Why isn’t it?
It is and it isn’t.
First, let’s assume (and this is a lot to assume) that ‘global warming’ is happening and it’s caused by mankind. How would you solve it?
Well, you could try cap-and-trade and other nonsense, or pumping stimulus money into ‘green’ alternatives. Then you can have a warm planet and a broke nation.
Or you can let the market solve the problem based on consumer demand, innovation, and the desire to find alternatives for depleting reserves of existing fuels.
As for the “it isn’t”, most people won’t argue with you that if left entirely to their own devices, businesses will pollute (and anybody who does argue that isn’t worth the time of day, because all you have to do is look at Tennessee in the 70′s, when businessmen kept extra shirts in their office to change as they browned during the day, or businesswomen kept extra pairs of stockings because they literally melted off their legs from the pollution – or look at Mexico today, where businesses and people pollute pretty freely). So yes, we will keep on cranking out CO2 and the like for a good long while.
But that’s just the thing: it’s going to happen, whether you like it or not. There is no magic bullet … contrary to his ludicrous speech, electing Obama doesn’t magically heal the planet, nor do any of the left-wing central-planning ideas.
Assuming there is a problem, we either fix it naturally and slowly via existing systems, or it doesn’t get fixed.
That’s reality.
The only way we can really stop carbon emissions is through new groundbreaking technologies. The R&D to discover the scientific principals and develop the new technology requires capital which requires a healthy economy. You’re not going to see groundbreaking new green technologies coming out of Namibia or Haiti. They’re too worried about eating to do expensive R&D. It takes a wealthy country to do this task.